I thought my phone couldn’t be any worse for my brain – then I started watching microdramas on it | Imogen West-Knights

Seven or eight years ago, a new kind of televisual entertainment was born in China. Microdramas: over-the-top, soap opera-type series with splashy, schlocky premises such as infidelity, arranged marriage and secret billionairehood, in which each episode is a mere 60-90 seconds long, took off there among an audience of the phone-addicted.

And now, as with many cultural phenomena that start in China, microdramas have made it over here. The form is forecast to take in $1.5bn in revenue in the US by the end of this year. Channel 4 announced recently that it was launching its first microdrama, and the UK is already leading Europe in terms of microdrama-watching, with 8.2 million of us tuning in to these things every month.

Numbers such as this give me a queasy, vertiginous feeling about the vast difference in possible human experiences existing alongside each other at the same time. What do you mean, millions and millions of people are watching this stuff that seems, to me, catastrophically brainless and objectively bad? Who? What do they eat for breakfast? What do they dream of at night?

Before I read those numbers, I had only seen tiny snippets of microdramas embedded into news pieces about the phenomenon. I wanted to know what it was like to actually watch one. I downloaded ReelShort, one of the apps that hosts microdramas exclusively, and flicked through the homepage. Recommended for me were Trapped in the Boss’s Embrace, I Had a Baby Without You and Carrying His Triplets, Becoming His Wifey. I went to the “HOT” tab and selected the one with the most convoluted title, Pregnant By My Ex’s Professor Dad, although Let Me Taste Your Husband also appealed.

In Pregnant By My Ex’s Professor Dad, it is legible right from the get-go who the bad guy is (the ex) and who the good guy is (the protagonist) and what is going to happen, not least because it is right there in the title. The question of “what is going to happen?” that is supposed to drive you into the next episode, the question that has driven all narrative since time immemorial, is rendered oddly moot.

There is no setup, no world-building, no padding whatsoever, just rapidly cut dramatic denouements over and over again: someone being cheated on, someone slapping someone else, a car window getting smashed, a new love interest being introduced, a sex scene. All of this happens in the first three minutes of the series. Helpless women swoon over geometrically jawed hunks on sets lit like a morgue and say exactly what they are thinking in voiceover, so that there is no room at all for nuance to creep in and engage your brain while you watch.

You can watch the first few episodes of any given series for free, and then you hit a paywall, which you can get around by watching ads for another form of phone brain rot: colour-matching mobile games. I have been told by loved ones before now that I couldn’t be a newsreader or a jury member because I can’t keep my emotions off my face. This is true. I caught sight of myself in my phone screen reflection while watching microdramas and saw there a person who looked as if they’d just spotted a pile of dog sick on the carpet.

I’m not incapable of enjoying bad television. I do not come here having descended from a lofty perch of only watching heritage BBC adaptations of classic novels or whatever. My appetite for dreck is hearty enough. But, my God – and can there be such an entity in a universe producing microdramas? – this stuff is awful. Flagrantly so, though, to the degree that I start to feel there is something wrong with me for desiring quality in this format.

Or I sense that I’ve done something wrong by intentionally going to watch one. In a piece for the New York Times Magazine, writer Daniel Kolitz described these shows as happening to people “like a food-borne illness”, rather than something that people elect to get into. They appear on your phone screen, and there you are, watching them in a half-conscious malaise while you wait for the day to end.

I would love for this kind of thing to go the way of non-fungible tokens: something we all had to hear about for a short time and that are now patently doomed to the scrapheap of short-lived modern internet detritus.

Maybe this is partly because my own feelings about internet detritus have changed lately. Whereas in the past I had a known, but not felt, understanding that the allure of apps and games and scrolling on my phone was bad for me, nowadays I am regularly experiencing real, bodily panic that my brain is being atrophied. I am scared of my phone, and my sick want for it. So the emergence of an all-new, even more terrible way of being on your phone does provoke the reactionary in me. “Just let people enjoy things!” a better person might think. Not this time.